How wonderful is when we get answers to our concerns in the first call to our Help Desk! For this to happen, the response time in your help desk should be really short. A quick response always leaves us perceiving that our requirements lay in expert hands. We also feel like we have made the right choice by picking up that particular Help Desk.
But being successfully attended at the first call are the less common cases. The real thing is, most of the Help Desk services keep us on hold for too long. Who hasn’t experienced automated systems that derives us for 10 different options before listening an operator?
By the moment we’ve reached the fifth option, we want to run away and hire other service providers. We wish they would listen to what we have to say, beyond the specific problem that leaded us to contact them in the first place… and giving them at least 5 tips to improve the response time in their Help Desk.
If you’re worried about this issue and you want to improve the response time of your Help Desk at your company, this article is for you.
Here we present five tips to improve the response time in your Help Desk. With this, your customers, suppliers and even your own employees, can channel their requirements and requests through a unified and efficient Help Desk. As a result, you will be providing faster and better responses than your competitors’.
1. Less is More
Currently, there are plenty technological options to install automated Help Desks. One of them, is reducing the number of employees devoted to the area of Customer Service, with the highly attractive consequence of saving lots of money to the company.
Although is always smart to profit service automation, is not as smart to abuse of it: Your customers do not call to your Help Desk to get lost in a tangle of branching options. They call for direct, fast, clear and accurate answers to their problems.
In other words, put smart limits to the options that unfold in your automated services.
To improve the response time in your Help Desk, apply technology tailored to your enterprise. And remember to customize your automated services: Give them friendly design geared to your user type, and provide the minimum options required to solve incidents.
2. Take into account the human factor
Having the best technological assets is as important as counting on qualified personnel, with proven ability to solve problems.
Therefore, try to select qualified staff for your Help Desk. Keep in mind they are the key to improve the response time in your Help Desk.
And do not get satisfied with that: Try to continuously update to those responsible for ruling your Help Desk service. Similarly, knuckle down to maintain your corporate culture in favor to projects related to your Help Desk service.
Your staff is your ally to improve the response time in your Help Desk. Reward them with training and recognition.
3. Customers Are The Main Focus
Whenever you make a change to a system or service offered in your company, you must ensure yourself that your customers know and understand such change. For example, if your goal is to improve the response time in your Help Desk, inform in detail to your customers about what it means, and the actions you are taking to carrying on that.
In order to do this, develop an information system: Send a FAQ list already answered about the common queries that will be directly solved in the Help Desk, and then post it on your website. Provide a direct number to clear their doubts while they assimilate the change, so they can call and get first hand information.
This list of questions should focus on the most common problems you will now on solve through the Help Desk. Focus on those that represent more than 30 or 40% of incidents, and filter which of them can be lead to the Help Desk.
Once your customers have seen and experienced the changes, send them a short survey where you can collect their perceptions. Make sure to provide a section for suggestions. And pay them attention.
Playing deaf with customers will bring a lot of discontent that result in losses.
Your customer’s negative opinions are potential ideas to improve your Help Desk. Then, evaluate the critics you receive with possitive spirit, and fix the problems even if you need to momentarily interrupt your services. Design strategies that allow you to further improve your Help Desk.
You will save more time and money if you make the necessary improvements in your Help Desk service. And you will do this better if you positively respond to the requests and complaints of your customers. Remember, they will be willing to pay more money if your services meet all their requirements.
4. Set Priority Levels in the Incidences
To improve the response time in your Help Desk, it’s essential to filter and prioritize the calls incoming to your support center.
Sort incidents accurately and quickly, taking into account the importance of the problem and the type of knowledge you needed to fix. Similarly, estimate the time required to do that. For this, you can create three levels of priority incidents, assigning specialists at each level as follows:
Level 1 Simple Topics
In this level, your team provide quick responses to give to your users the feeling that their problems are really important for your company. This avoids your customer’s frustration and stops at once the need to making many calls for solving a simple request.
Level 2 Advanced topics
This level groups requirements that need security permission access, or those that cannot be resolved in Level 1.
Level 3 Complex topics
This level gathers those requirements that demand deep changes in procedures or programs, as well as chronic issues that require further investigation for resolution.
5. Adopt Specialized Technologies to manage response time in your help desk
Help Desks hosted in the cloud allow the users to get answers to their problems without even calling. These questions oftern will be directly solved from an online Knowledge Base.
This gives some control to users to open themselves their own incidents and monitor the status of their queries, while providing other means of communication between them and Help Desk.
The inclusion of new technologies will always improve the response time in your Help Desk.
Improving the response time in your Help Desk is easier if your technology platform keeps historical records of common problems. This will allow you to develop interactive pages for directly helping your customers with illustrations and attachments. This, besides preventing them to saturate your Help Desk with phone calls.
Monitor the performance of your software solutions
Similarly, technology platforms will give full reports with complex parameters to analyze. You will be able to assess such as the time your staff need to solve incidents, and create reports with defined parameters.
In short, we have these 5 tips to improve the response time in your HelpDesk:
- Simplify the use of your Help Desk to your customers
- Capitalize the Human Resource of your Help Desk
- Listen and take advantage from your customer’s suggestions and critics
- Establish patterns for incident attention
- Compile a Knowledge Base hosted in The Cloud, and make it available for your customers
Now you have in your hands 5 tips to improve your response time in your Help Desk. With them, you will guarantee better attention and support to your users, while giving to them the added value of the satisfaction they deserve, saving time and money for your company.
